bright night, on the terrace of the
cafe forming one of the angles of the Place de l'Opera. He sat down with
him, but at the end of five minutes uttered a protest against the crush
and confusion, the publicity and vulgarity of the place, the shuffling
procession of the crowd, the jostle of fellow-customers, the perpetual
brush of waiters. "Come away; I want to talk to you and I can't talk
here. I don't care where we go. It will be pleasant to walk; well stroll
away to the _quartiers serieux_. Each time I come to Paris I at the end
of three days take the Boulevard, with its conventional grimace, into
greater aversion. I hate even to cross it--I go half a mile round to
avoid it."

The young men took their course together down the Rue de la Paix to the
Rue de Rivoli, which they crossed, passing beside the gilded rails of
the Tuileries. The beauty of the night--the only defect of which was
that the immense illumination of Paris kept it from being quite night
enough, made it a sort of bedizened, rejuvenated day--gave a charm to
the quieter streets, drew our friends away to the right, to the river
and the bridges, the older, duskier city. The pale ghost of the palace
that had perished by fire hung over them a while, and, by the passage
now open at all times across the garden of the Tuileries, they came out
upon the Seine. They kept on and on, moving slowly, smoking, talking,
pausing, stopping to look, to emphasise, to compare. They fell into
discussion, into confidence, into inquiry, sympathetic or satiric, and
into explanations which needed in turn to be explained. The balmy night,
the time for talk, the amusement of Paris, the memory of younger
passages, gave a lift to the occasion. Nick had already forgotten his
little brush with Julia on his leaving Peter's tea-party at her side,
and that he had been almost disconcerted by the asperity with which she
denounced the odious man he had taken it into his head to force upon
her. Impertinent and fatuous she had called him; and when Nick began to
plead that he was really neither of these things, though he could
imagine his manner might sometimes suggest them, she had declared that
she didn't wish to argue about him or ever to hear of him again. Nick
hadn't counted on her liking Gabriel Nash, but had thought her not
liking him wouldn't perceptibly matter. He had given himself the
diversion, not cruel surely to any one concerned, of seeing what she
would make of a type she had neve